Professor Curtin has returned to Brown, visiting starting 9/1/22 and full time on 1/1/23, after an 11 year soujourn at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland.
Dr. William Curtin received a combined 4 yr. ScB/ScM degree in Physics from Brown University in 1981 and a PhD in theoretical physics from Cornell University in 1986, working on the optical properties of metal nanoparticles and on statistical mechanics theories of freezing. Dr. Curtin then joined the Applied Physics Group at the British Petroleum Research Laboratories (formerly SOHIO) in Cleveland, OH, where he worked on hydrogen storage in amorphous metal alloys, the statistical mechanics of crystal/melt interfaces, and the mechanics of ceramic and composites. In 1993, he joined the faculty at Virginia Tech with a joint appointment in Materials Science & Engineering and Engineering Science & Mechanics. In 1998, Professor Curtin returned to Brown University as a faculty member in the Solid Mechanics group of the Division of Engineering. Professor Curtin was appointed as the Elisha Benjamin Andrews Professor at Brown in 2006. Prof. Curtin joined the Institute of Mechanical Engineering at EPFL as Institute Director in 2011 and then also as Professor in 2012. His research interests are detailed elsewhere.
Previously at Brown, he was the Director of the Center for Advanced Materials Research at Brown, Director of the NSF Materials Research Science and Engineering Center at Brown, and founding Director of the General Motors/Brown Collaborative Research Laboratory on Computational Materials Science. He has published over 300 scientific papers has been Principal Investigator on over $36M in research funding, was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2005-06 to pursue research on multiscale modeling of materials, and has presented many invited talks at national and international venues.
